El espejo inglés de la modernidad española: el modelo electoral británico y su influencia en el concepto de representación liberal

Abstract

This article analyses the influence the British electoral system exercised over the Spanish liberals during the central decades of the 19th century in constructing their own model of representative governance. On the basis of a study of parliamentary debate and the more intellectual discourse collected in various essays, the author tries to reconstruct how the Spanish liberals saw the British model and how they used its example as an authoritative argument in drawing up electoral legislation. Going beyond legal specificities, the British system also provided materials for political and cultural efforts to construct parliamentary legitimacy, as most of the families of Spanish liberalism considered it as a mirror image of representative authenticity, as compared to the French model.